The Israel-founded company will collaborate with the urology and gynecology departments at the clinic.
Theator, a startup from Israel, and the Mayo Clinic have agreed to work together on bringing surgical AI technology to operating rooms.
They will collaborate to test the artificial technology for improving surgeon performance.
The AI technology in question will be applied to the urology and gynecology departments at the Mayo Clinic. Surgeons there will test the annotation and video analytics tech meant to help improve the performance of the doctors. This will be focused in particular on the pre-operative preparation as well as the post-operative analysis and debriefing.
The Theator-developed computer vision software provides real-time video footage scanning of procedures and key moments. In this way, surgeons are able to view recordings of procedures which have been broken down into practical steps. They can also choose to rewind steps or fast forward through them in order to learn about precisely what is relevant to them. This tech’s users can also obtain digital summaries of their own surgical performance, using graphics, analytics and rankings to point out precisely where they would benefit from further training and skills development.
This AI technology collaboration follows an investment by Mayo Clinic into Theator’s 2021 funding round.
The start-up was founded by Dotan Asselman and Tamir Wolf in 2018. It has an R&D center in Israel and completed a successful $15.5 million Series A funding round earlier This year.
By working with Mayo Clinic in this way, the firm is keen to gain “a rich array of insights from world-class urology and gynecology departments, with the goal of broadening our experience in order to tackle the pressing problems of disparity and variability in surgical care today,” said Wolf, now also the company’s CEO.
Working in AI technology collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, “will deepen our visual and contextual understanding of surgical best practices and enable us to refine 
and develop our preoperative preparation and postoperative debrief Surgical Intelligence platform, helping surgeons around the world upskill and raise the standards of care for even more patients,” the CEO went on to explain.
